


say what you're thinking

by horriblekids



Series: '03verse (trying too hard) [1]
Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: 2003 AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29579778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horriblekids/pseuds/horriblekids
Summary: Calum sits up and stretches - his joints pop and creak in protest - and then he says, “That was weird. Let’s go to the skate park.” Michael ignores his weird boner and pushes himself off the bed, following after his best friend so they can put their shoes on by the front door and grab their boards.Prequel to walking backwards, set in 2003.
Relationships: Michael Clifford/Calum Hood
Series: '03verse (trying too hard) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2170044
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	say what you're thinking

**Author's Note:**

> Another existing piece of '03verse! This is set before the events of everything else, pretty much. I almost thought this fic was lost to the ages, actually - I had no backups left in google docs or on my computer so I had to do some deep digging for this one.

They find out about the Distillers from the Give ‘Em The Boot 3 compilation. Calum looks the band up on his sister’s computer and immediately decides that Brody Dalle is his dream woman. “Just look at her,” Calum sighs dreamily, staring at her exposed midriff and heavily red-lipsticked mouth. And when Michael looks at her he doesn’t see dream-girl potential, he just sees a bad-ass woman with the coolest tattoos he’s ever seen. He still nods anyway, peering over Calum’s shoulder at a series of steadily more horrifying Angelfire sites dedicated to punk music as they try to find out some other bands to check out. Something in his chest loosens up when they start looking at The Starting Line instead. The lead singer is lanky and has dyed-blond hair and piercing blue eyes; Michael gets distracted looking at blurry screenshots of their latest music video so much that he misses the question Calum’s just asked him.

“Sorry, what?” he asks, flicking his fringe out of his eyes. The world comes back to life around him, Calum’s bare feet in his lap and his own legs dangling over the edge of the bed. He realizes then that they’re on a different page now with hard-to-read text and blocky, pixelating glitter graphics every few paragraphs. Kenny Vasoli’s dead-eyed blue gaze is no longer staring at him through the laptop screen - Calum’s back to the Distillers again, staring hungrily at Brody Dalle’s navel as though it holds the secrets to the universe.

Calum gives him an affectionate shove and repeats, “Are you staying for dinner or not, asshole?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, thinking of his own mother’s dried-out meatloaf and, probably, steamed vegetables on the side tasting like cardboard. Michael much prefers Calum’s house to his own; Calum’s house is always loud and bustling with life, appetizing smells wafting up the stairs from the kitchen in the afternoons. His own house is a ghost town - the upstairs is nothing less than pristine at all times, white and sparkling and ‘Don’t touch the walls, Michael, it leaves a mark’ - and sometimes it feels more like a mausoleum. At his house they wouldn’t be allowed to have the volume on the laptop turned up at all. In Calum’s bedroom, despite the requisite Nelly poster staring down at them with a plaster on his cheek for no apparent reason, they get to turn the music up to full blast. He appreciates that Calum never complains about listening to his music as long as they put the Beastie Boys on afterward - and Michael does have to admit that the Beastie Boys is a nice segue into Eminem sometimes.

They tire of the hunt for new music quickly - there’s only so much they can do before the bands all start sounding the same - and Calum clicks over to their favorite pastime of the month, Friendster. No one they know is on the site; it’s more of a morbid curiosity thing that they do sometimes, like a sneak peek into other people’s lives. Michael thinks Calum mostly does it so he can look at pictures of girls they don’t see every day when he’s jacking off. He doesn’t - well, he does jack off - he doesn’t, like, think of a specific person when he does that. And anyway, he respects women or some shit like that.

“Do you ever think we’re wasting our potential?” he asks, reaching over Calum for the bag of Cheetos they’d brought upstairs with them. The orange dust falls in a fine mist onto the bedspread. He shoves a handful into his mouth and chews them noisily before sucking the remaining Cheeto dust off his fingertips.

“You’re disgusting,” Calum tells him. “This is why we don’t have other friends.”

Michael throws a handful of Cheetos at him and frowns. “Fuck you, I have a sparkling personality.”

“Yeah, says who?”

“Your mom,” Michael tells him, still laughing at his own joke when Calum punches him in the shoulder roughly. They end up wrestling on the bed, knocking the laptop over as they use elbows and knees to try and get on top. It’s a regular occurrence with them - he’ll make some stupid joke and Calum will say ‘I’m gonna kill you’ and try to wrestle him, even though he’s taller and has at least fifty pounds on Calum now - and it lasts until they’re both out of breath, laughing. “I let you have that,” he says. “I let you beat me that time.”

The duvet is covered with smushed-in Cheetos and spilled Mountain Dew. “Fuck, mum’s going to kill me,” Calum says miserably. And the sounds of Avril Lavigne come through the wall suddenly from the bathroom on the other side. They both bang on the wall and Calum yells, “Turn it off!” indignantly. The music pauses for a minute so that they can hear Mali-Koa laughing in the bathroom and then it starts up even louder than it had been before. Even Michael has to admit that he’d rather hear Ja Rule on repeat than another second of ‘Sk8er Boi’. And that’s totally his guilty pleasure song, but it’s not like he’s going to go around telling people that. Everyone already thinks he’s a poser; he doesn’t need to add fuel to the fire.

Even with an annoying older sister, Calum’s house is still better than his own. A few minutes later Calum tosses him one of the Playstation controllers and they start up Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. “Graffiti or slap?” Michael asks, toggling through the skater options. He picks Jango Fett solely for the hilarity factor and Calum chooses Rune Glifberg, because he always chooses Rune Glifberg.

“Surprised you didn’t pick Bam,” Calum says, highlighting the graffiti option from the main menu. “Considering how far up his ass you are, I mean, you probably know what he had for lunch today.” Referring, of course, to Bam Margera of CKY and Jackass fame, and which has nothing to do with the poster of him on Michael’s wall in the basement at home. It’s not weird to have a poster of him. It’s certainly not any weirder than Calum’s shirtless Ja Rule poster glaring down at them. He thinks about making a joke about that, maybe, but he’d rather not think about it while he’s kicking Calum’s ass at Pro Skater. Besides, he doesn’t know what he can say in his defense. Rather than argue about it he throws his legs back over Calum’s lap and starts the game out soft - double heelflip into boneless on the lip of a ramp - smirking when his skater lands the trick and the area turns blue.

He shoves his elbow hard into Calum’s stomach when he launches his character into an Andrect Invert on the same lip and holds it until the points multiplier maxes out. “Show-off,” Michael grumbles. Instead of shoving him off, Calum curls an arm around him, pulling him down until his head’s pillowed comfortably on Calum’s shoulder. He makes Jango Fett skate up a ramp and executes a sloppy semi flip landing into a very wobbly truckstand. They quickly grow bored of playing graffiti - there’s only so many rounds they can play before it starts to get repetitive - and Calum starts up a rowdy game of slap, smashing into Michael’s skater from every direction. And the goal of the game isn’t so much to win as it is to take out their pent-up aggression on each other.

The controllers get shoved off the bed in favor of wrestling each other - Michael sinks his teeth into Calum’s shoulder when his arms get pinned, biting down hard until Calum goes “Fuck,” and he can get one arm out from under them to dig his fingers into Calum’s ribs - and then abruptly, it stops. He’s out of breath anyway. “You know I don’t,” Calum wheezes, struggling to catch his breath after being elbowed in the stomach one too many times. Out of habit Michael hands him his inhaler and waits for him to resume breathing normally.

One of the unique joys of being best friends with an asthmatic is discovering inhalers jammed in all the pockets of his cargo shorts. “You good?” he asks once Calum hands it back to him. “What were you trying to say anyway?”

“I don’t,” Calum starts. “I was just - have you ever thought about, like.” His cheeks are burning crimson and he avoids eye contact as he rolls onto his side, fitting neatly between Michael half-hanging off the mattress and the wall. And Michael waits for him to finish, twisting the jelly bracelets around his wrist idly. “No, never mind, it’s too embarrassing.”

“Fuck off, there’s nothing you can say that’s too embarrassing.”

Calum lowers his voice almost to a whisper and buries his face in a pillow as soon as he’s finished speaking. “I don’t know, have you ever thought about, like, kissing another guy.” And Michael would be a liar if he didn’t admit to thinking about it sometimes; mostly it’s in an abstract way, like, is beard burn a real thing, do guys taste different than girls do. But there are times - and he’d rather die than admit it to his best friend - that he thinks about it with his hand down his shorts, thinks about kissing some guy maybe a little older than himself, a little more experienced maybe? It’s not, like. He wouldn’t date another guy probably, he thinks, but he could definitely see the appeal of kissing one all sloppy and rough instead of the delicate, hesitant way that girls kiss.

Feeling similarly embarrassed to how Calum looks, he says, “Yeah, I’ve thought about it,” and chews the inside of his lower lip until he tastes blood. Neither of them can look each other in the eye now. A long, painfully slow silence passes between them before he works up the nerve to ask. “So, have you, ummm…?”

“I… Yeah,” Calum admits. He’s covering his face with both hands, peering at Michael through the spaces between his fingers. The flush on his cheeks is half embarrassment and half curiosity poorly disguised since they’ve known each other approximately half their lives. Michael doesn’t know if he wants to move forward or back away, slowly flatten himself against the mattress until he disappears. He can’t believe they’re having this conversation when he hasn’t even had his first proper kiss yet.

“Would you?” he asks. “Like if someone…?”

And maybe he’s pushed it too far, he thinks for a second - he’s always doing that by accident, pushing people out of their comfort zones, making things weird with his stupid mouth - but then Calum leans up on one skinny forearm and looks at him. “Is that your way of asking without asking,” Calum says, just barely hiding his amusement. “‘Cause I would, like, just to see - I mean, it’s not like there’re people lining up to kiss either of us, so.”

Michael wrinkles his nose at that - there are people he wouldn’t mind kissing - but he has to admit that Calum’s right. “All right, then,” he says. He unfolds from where he’s tucked both arms under himself and reaches out for Calum. But he doesn’t want to be, like, the girl in this situation, so he starts leaning in at the same moment that Calum leans over him, effectively headbutting him instead of their mouths ending up even remotely near each other. “You dick,” Michael laughs, pressing the back of one hand to his forehead to soothe the ache until it goes away. “Try that again,” he demands, “I want a do-over.”

“You’re so pushy,” Calum teases him. He’s slower in leaning this time, eyes open until the last second, and Michael has to roll away giggling because Calum’s lips puckered up ready to kiss him is the funniest thing ever. Annoyed, Calum flicks him in the ear and darts forward before he can get bashful or turn away again. “C’mere,” and then they’re kissing, dry lips on dry lips. It’s awkward and unfamiliar - their teeth knock together a couple of times until they find each other, Michael tipping his head to the side slightly. He can’t help laughing and squirming the entire time. Calum pulls back after a minute and stares at him wide-eyed, mouth drawn into a tight, confused line.

“Well, that was…” Michael says, rolling onto his back to stare at the glow in the dark stars they’d pasted onto Calum’s ceiling when they were ten. He doesn’t feel any particular way about it, but he doesn’t want to hurt Calum’s feelings by saying so. “Did you feel anything?” he asks. And even though he hadn’t liked it much he can feel his dick twitching in his shorts, confirming what he had already suspected but hadn’t been willing to admit to himself. He likes kissing guys, he thinks - or at least the idea behind it - but not this guy; not Calum, who he’s known since they were in swimming lessons together and he’d had to wear water wings to keep from drowning in the community pool. But he’s not going to be the only one to admit something. When Calum shrugs he clamps his mouth firmly shut and decides that he’s never going to tell anyone.

Calum sits up and stretches - his joints pop and creak in protest - and then he says, “That was weird. Let’s go to the skate park.” Michael ignores his weird boner and pushes himself off the bed, following after his best friend so they can put their shoes on by the front door and grab their boards. He’s not… he’s not a poser, exactly, but he’s not great at skating either - always the last to master a new trick, tripping over his own damn feet and scraping up his knees and elbows constantly. He likes the wind rushing at him as he pushes off with his right foot, riding his board down the street with Calum close behind him. It’s only three blocks to the park; there’s usually a small cluster of people working on their tricks or sitting against the fence watching.

Michael does a shaky grind on the curb in front of the park and overshoots by a lot, sending himself pitching forward into the sidewalk and his board shooting backwards across the residential street. He’s seconds from smashing into the pavement when there are hands grabbing his sides roughly, hauling him up. “Shit,” he breathes in relief. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, no worries,” his rescuer says. And Michael vaguely recognizes him from school; one of the quiet kids that sits at the back of class with his head down, never really talking to anyone. Under the pale fluorescent lighting at school he hadn’t realized how pretty this kid was - and it’s disquieting to be thinking that about another guy in light of his recent sexual awakening. As if sensing that Michael has no idea who he is, the guy shoves his hands into the pockets of the hoodie he’s wearing awkwardly and says, “I’m Ashton. We have health together?”

“Oh,” Michael says. “Right. Cool. Anyway, thanks for like… stopping me from wiping out and everything.” He feels like an idiot - he can’t think of anything to say - so he looks behind him for Calum, who’s hanging back and snickering at him in amusement. The sun is hanging low in the sky, casting everything with a soft purple-pink haze. Calum shoves his board at his stomach roughly and then runs away laughing. Michael rubs the back of his neck with one hand, strangely embarrassed. “I’ll see you around then, I guess,” he tells Ashton.

He notices that Ashton hangs back by the fence a moment to watch him scale it, tossing his board over first before hopping onto the first bar holding the chain links in place and heaving himself over it. “Perfect ten, bro!” one of the shitty twelve year olds on a BMX bike says snottily. He lands ass-first, palms skittering across the concrete roughly to break his fall. When he looks back Ashton’s shaking his head, smiling indulgently at him. And, like, maybe he wouldn’t kiss someone like Calum - or maybe Calum’s just too familiar to him, inhaler and stupid-looking haircut and all - but now when he thinks about kissing a guy he pictures honey-toned hair and hazel eyes and it’s not so bad, actually.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, if you want to listen to my horrible, tiny goblin self talk about writing, [Tumblr](http://anxietycalling.tumblr.com) is the place to be. I also have no self-control, so if you want snippets of stuff I'm writing without context you can find them there.


End file.
